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Hmm... So, if the afterimages are not due to Nightblood (which I do think they are, myself), then they most likely would be something about Szeth's soul being slightly out of sync with the Physical Realm. I would think that this would either be because of the way that Nalan healed him being slightly imperfect or that something is pulling at soul--which could be any number of things, from Odium's influence to something peculiar about using an Honorblade for an extended period of time.

Maybe. You could make an argument for Radiants being demigods (though I find that somewhat dubious), but only because they are humans bonded with Splinters, and we have an example, in the Returned, of a Splinter/human bond producing something that could accurately be called a demigod. That, however, is a bond where the human and Splinter essentially become one being. On the other end of the spectrum, we have the Splinter/human bond on Sel, where non-Elantrians bonded to seons are certainly not demigods. Radiants seem to be somewhere in between. Nalan's state of mind being what it is, it might be valid to interpret the things he says in a lot of different ways, but I would wager that he understands the workings of the Cosmere well enough that he himself would not call a Radiant a demigod.

I don't know why exactly, but something about Arclo made me think that Dysian Aimians are not necessarily all hordes of cremlings; rather, they're all the same type of creature, but their essence isn't exactly physical (so individuals might be composed of hordes of any number of creatures that their true essence is bonded to via a spren-like bond).

I thought it was pretty clear that she'd never heard that particular brand of very bizarre slang before. Lift's general irreverence is a humorous contrast to the Edgedancers' stated reputation for eloquence, but when you think about it, this kind of ability would lend itself to eloquence just as easily as to immediately slipping into an unfamiliar slang dialect. I would say that this theory is almost certainly correct.

Really powerful Splinters could be considered demigods. I assumed that he was just talking about some of the Unmade and/or other similar superspren.

@Kanrei The quote I found is, "Nightblood can feed off Stormlight, but Szeth can't draw in Stormlight right now. So Szeth better not draw that sword, for a while at least." The "for a while at least" part suggests that it will be fine at some point.

There's another quote, "Nightblood is a very unique kind of Shardblade, but IS a Shardblade," and one features of Shardblades is that they can be bonded. Assuming that the process is more like bonding a dead Blade than a live spren, then it would simply take some time (explaining that "for a while"). He also does partially draw Nightblood, which would likely be pretty damaging to him if he wasn't past that point.

As for the Surges, well, the other Skybreakers certainly seem to assume that Szeth can join them. That doesn't prove anything, necessarily, but Szeth's response to them indicates pretty clearly that he is choosing not to do so because he doesn't wish to be in the Everstorm again. There's nothing definitive there, but the circumstantial evidence very strongly points to him having access to, if not Gravitation, then something like it. 

I think Nalan's partial explanation of why he has been hunting down Surgebinders gives us some clues to the circumstances surrounding the Recreance. When Dalinar has visions of the Knights Radiant, it seemed like at least some of them came after the last Desolation, but they were still fighting destructive creatures that we no longer see on Roshar. It seems possible that these beings are Splinters of some variety (no doubt from Braize), who were imitating the example of radiantspren and using some type of bonding to move into the Physical Realm on Roshar. If so, the Recreance was an attempt (apparently successful) at stopping that from happening anymore. Somehow, the Skybreakers' regimented, rule-based approach to bonding their spren does not provide the same opportunity for the evil spren (or whatever they are), so they stuck around and changed their Orders' mission to stopping the Radiants from reappearing, rather than directly protecting the people of Roshar. I suspect that the Recreance was twofold: 1) A large portion--but not all--of the Radiants living at the time broke their Bonds, and 2) The Skybreakers hunted down the remaining Knights who remained faithful (that would be the "great subterfuge").

I think that Edgedancer more or less confirms that Ym was a nascent Edgedancer (and Stump is too). Stump and Ym obviously had similar spren. They don't look like Wyndle because Lift's connection to the Cognitive Realm eased his transition into the Nahel bond. Syl didn't look much like herself when she first started appearing, but Wyndle has always been the Cultivationspren version of the miniature lady that Syl becomes because he didn't have to grow back into himself. Wyndle was able to confirm that Stump's spren qualified as a radiantspren, which strongly implies to me that he was able to recognize it as the windspren to his little lady. Also, it looks like lifespren are related to Edgedancers' Plate the way windspren are to Windrunners' (assuming that very likely theory is correct).

As for Szeth, it does seem like he has Gravitation again, but I suspect that there is something unusual about his Surges. Because of Nightblood's nature, I am confident that he does grant Surges as part of a bond on Roshar, but I am less confident that they will automatically be the Skybreaker ones, just because Nalan "adopted" him. It could be, though.

Yeah, he definitely did not know that Nalan was a Herald. Only when he heard Szeth call him by name did he realize, and then he started to freak out about it (or perhaps just worry a bit more aggressively than usual). There are a number of possibilities as to why he didn't pick up on his Honorblade being different. If it isn't because Syl is just different from Wyndle, it could be because there is nothing odd to sense when a Herald is using their own Honorblade, but something seems off when a normal human uses one.

I think that you should wait and see what the book brings before you get despondent, @maxal. First of all, you've known for a very long time that, despite your preferences, Adolin is not one of the main characters, so you at least were already prepared that Adolin just isn't going to get the kind of page time you would like. Secondly, regardless of what the visual outline seems to indicate, Brandon himself implies in the update that he did not eliminate the POV; he just moved it. Sure, some things will probably get cut, just to make the chronology work, but it sounds to me like he's still getting just as much (or at least almost as much) POV time.

Furthermore, like you, I suspect that Adolin is Tertiary character number 1. If so, the outline suggests that his POV chapters are being set up to have a really big payoff. You have to admit that, already knowing that your favorite character isn't going to get the attention you would like, the best case scenario is for what he does get to have maximum impact. Adolin is going to be in Dalinar's POVs. He is going to be in Shallan's POVs. He's probably going to be in Kaladin's POVs. Chances are good that if there are any Jasnah POVs, he's going to show up there, too. All that time, we're going to have the knowledge of what happened with Sadeas coloring our interpretation of his actions, but the other characters probably won't know a thing. It's going to really build up the anticipation surrounding his character's arc. The payoff when we do finally get to see inside his head is going to be really big, that way. 

I have to say, one of the great constants of the Shard is that, no matter how long I've been away, I know I'm going to come back to find you being sad about Adolin. I'm not trying to talk you out of your feelings, but I feel bad that you're so unhappy about the situation. Just imagine how bad it would be if you were reading any other series, and your favorite character was a tertiary one. Stormlight really is the best series for a reader who prefers a tertiary character to any primary or secondary ones, and Adolin is the very best character for it to happen with. Adolin got 22,634 words in TWoK and 28,895 in WoR. 51,529 words of dedicated POV, for a character who also appears in a lot of other POVs, is really not too bad. No other tertiary character comes close. If the primary characters get a lot less page time in Part 4 (which makes a ton of sense, if I'm right about Adolin's POV being saved for a really big payoff), then we may still be looking at 20,000 words for him. And I would put money on that little bit at the end being a major bombshell.

Yeah, there is a lot of that. It's possible that it's a result of the decision to do an additional volume. That is, Weeks had too much material for one book but not enough to do two books as long as the others in the series, so they padded out this entry with the formatting.

I think that you'll probably stop thinking about that in like 50-60 pages, though. 

Stormlight can work as a movie series, but there would have to be major changes to the way that the story is told. For one thing, the way that the story is a total mystery throughout, in all sorts of ways (what's up with the Heralds? what exactly happened in this history that we get brief glimpses of? What happened to Kaladin in the past? Shallan? Dalinar?)--that wouldn't work for a movie. They'd have to give us a lot more up front, without a bunch of beating around the bush about what is even going on from moment to moment. They'll have to take a good long look at what is accomplished in each character's arc in WoK and figure out how to take that and distill it into a relative handful of scenes that communicate all the same things, much, much more briefly. 

This means that Kaladin's hundreds of pages of depression and bad attitude would need to be summed up in a grand total of maybe 10 minutes' worth of screen time. Establishing a relationship with Syl, the way he finds new motivation and establishes a relationship with Bridge Four, etc.--these would have to be turned from events that slowly unfold over the course of 1,000 pages into a couple of key scenes.

Shallan could still be a part of the movie, but her efforts to become Jasnah's ward would have to be cut down to a couple of minutes. All of her studying would have to summed up with maybe 30 seconds worth of sighing over stacks of books and furious notes scribbling. What Shallan was up to would have to be laid out explicitly, not split up into a bunch of scenes that invite you to gradually piece together a picture of what she's doing. The transition from the Shattered Plains to Kharbranth would have to be done via extremely obvious segue. Like, as Dalinar is wrapping up a conversation, he could explicitly say, "My niece, Jasnah, is off researching..." and then it fades to Jasnah in Kharbranth, with someone calling, "Brightness Jasnah! Brightness Jasnah! [she turns to them] Ah, Brightness Jasnah! So good to see you..." The audience is already going to be way over their heads in this universe of moving plants and floating lights and mysterious magic, so they need to be told 5 times that there is a person named Jasnah, and she is related to the royal family and she--Jasnah, that is--likes to study, and--oh!--here she is, in a different city (like that other character just said she was, two or three times), and again, her name is Jasnah. Jasnah? Yes, Jasnah. 

In the end, once you trimmed away a lot of the internal debates and reflection (which are a great part of the books but don't work at all for a movie) and summed them up in brief scenes that communicate the characters' personalities and motivations succinctly (if with far less depth), you would have a couple of expository scenes and a bunch of action. It would definitely work, if it was done very, very well. Ultimately, almost every scene in the movie would probably end up not happening the way it did in the books at all but also still get the story to the same place. 

That said, Mistborn practically screams to be adapted first. Opening a franchise about a galaxy full of intricately detailed magic systems and demigods and such with a story hung on a familiar heist movie frame is just smart. The Shards' role in the plot is clearest of any Cosmere work, but the audience would have some time to settle in with how the magic works first. By the end of the trilogy, moviegoers would have some notion of how the whole universe works, and it would just work out a whole lot better. Doing WoK first would be like Marvel doing Guardians of the Galaxy before Iron Man. 

I can't find any update on a Worm sequel that isn't at least one year old. I assume that he's still planning to do it after Twig. I haven't been following Twig, though, so I don't know how far off that will be. I loved Worm, but I really, really disliked Pact (yet still felt like I needed to finish it). I don't want that to happen with something that's still coming out in serialized form. I just want to wait until it's done, read the whole thing, and hopefully not be mad that I did when I'm finished. 

As for what Worm 2 would be about, I would think that the best way to do it would be to explore the connected multiverse that is created at the end. Just go in a totally different direction. The plot of the first one really completes the story in a way that makes it pretty much impossible to do a sequel that is just more of the same but ups the ante a little.

@Pagerunner Ah, okay! I see what you're getting at now. That is a good point. It's probably impossible to really compare the actual impact of a hit show versus a hit movie on growing the readership of the source material with just those examples alone. In general, movies are automatically taken seriously until they prove themselves to be ridiculous; whereas, the opposite is true of TV shows. Most TV shows looking for acclaim have tons of adult-oriented material, like they have to work hard to prove that they're not kids' stuff, so it's no surprise that the first fantasy TV show to get major widespread recognition for its quality is GoT. The source material is just as adult-oriented, so it's definitely going to have have a narrower appeal than Harry Potter, which is also easier to read, can be appreciated by adults and children, etc. That said, I believe that a movie does have a bigger impact than a TV show; I just wish we could find out exactly what that is.

I don't know where to find the data, but I am fairly certainly that it can be empirically proved that The Game of Thrones TV show did lead to more readers of A Song of Ice and Fire. I found this chart that at least shows a pretty significant boost in sales:

I'm not trying to hijack the thread. I just think that we should put aside the notion that Game of Thrones didn't lead to more GRRM readers. If that has been anyone's personal experience, I have no doubt that you don't know anyone in your group of friends who started reading the books because of the show, but that doesn't change the overall trends. I, for one, read ASoIaF because of the show and also all the Wild Cards books, except for the latest one. That's a lot of books that I may well have never read if not for the show. In fact, it is because of reading those books that I realized that fantasy is the genre that I most enjoy reading, so me being a huge fan of Brandon Sanderson's books, The Wheel of Time, Lightbringer... All of that can be traced to the Game of Thrones show.

Anyway, The Stormlight Archive is a very odd choice to start with, as a lot of others have noticed. Mistborn is a much better idea, and I also hope that they go with that. Even so, SA could be adapted into movies, and there is the advantage of budget associated with doing it that way (even though I think a TV series would work better for such a long story). If they don't even start production for another 5 years, the first arc may well be complete (or close to it) by the time the first movie comes out.

@ccstat I think a few days is fine, myself. Most of the active posters here are like you and me and will usually devour a book that they're into pretty quickly. As long as we use spoiler tags, I don't see a problem. I just think it's a bad idea to start posting them the day after release. I know how it is to be excited about a new book and unable to actually sit down and read it, but you do have time to occasionally check Internet posts about it. All of those spoiler-tagged comments start looking mighty tempting after a while.

I'm going to revive this thread now because I'm fairly certain those of us following the series will want to discuss The Blood Mirror. I already have things that I want to talk about, but I'll wait until I'm sure more people have started reading because it's almost 100% spoilers. Obviously, I'll spoiler tag stuff if and when the discussion starts up, but I really don't think I should even tempt people to look by posting them at this point.

20 minutes ago, Argent said:

I think I'll hold off on reading that anyway

I am 90% certain that you'll know when it's okay to read it. 

On 10/24/2016 at 4:22 PM, Zathoth said:

The Blood Mirror (Im sure Im not the only one), Red Seas Over Red Skies, Weaveworld by Clive Barker, Elric of Melniboné by Micheal Morcook and Childhoods End.

I'm only halfway through The Broken Eye, but anyway.

Man, The Blood Mirror is awesome. As I noted in the What Are You Reading? thread, I read the first 400 pages last night. I seriously could not put it down.

2 hours ago, Argent said:

I finished the Cycle of Hatred by Keith R.A. DeCandido (yet another Warcraft book) just in time to start working on Brent Weeks' latest Lightbringer installment, The Blood Mirror. I've been looking forward to it.

I just got The Blood Mirror yesterday, and holy @#$% is it good! I couldn't read any until I got home from work, but I still got through over 400 pages last night. 

By the way, there are no actual spoilers above, but I feel like I'm referencing a spoiler so big that even vague allusions should be spoilered out right now. I'm very happy with this book and have the feeling that I am going to be very upset when I finish it and have to wait a long time for the final volume.

I just read Battlemage by Stephen Aryan. It is bad. I really feel bad panning a creative work publicly because I know what goes into their creation, but after buying the book because I'd seen it on a couple of lists of good modern fantasy, I feel like I have to warn others. The writing is simple to a fault--to the point that it actually distracts from the story with elementary exposition that reads almost like a kid is telling you a story. "This was happening because of that. Also, so-and-so did not like that because they have this opinion." It would have been fine for a younger audience, if it weren't for the violence, profanity, and gore. And there are just bizarre faults that one would think that an editor would catch, like, "She put on the mask and lifted the hood." What mask? When you say, "the mask," surely you've mentioned a mask before, right? Nope. "Lifted her hood," would be fine--hoods are common enough, after all--but using "the" suggests that it's a specific hood that has recently been mentioned. It wasn't.

If there was anything original about the story, I would forgive those faults, but there wasn't. The magic is fueled by "the Source," which, when drawn on, enhances ones senses. Draw too much, and you can burn yourself out or die. Sound familiar? It does if you've read The Wheel of Time. But what I explained is about all there is to it, so it's not like it's similar to WoT's magic, with some variation. It's like WoT's magic, with far less detail.

You've got a bunch of standard characters--a grizzled old veteran soldier (he ends up secretly being a god of some sort, but that potentially interesting twist isn't enough to redeem anything about the story), the titular Battlemage who really doesn't have anything much to distinguish his character, the princess who overworks herself as her father's spymaster and is unexpectedly raised to queen when he dies. And, no, I'm not sorry for posting spoilers without warning. You shouldn't read this book. Cliches abound, including a tribe of black people who wear bone jewelry and only loincloths for clothing, like a racist African stereotype. Their magic is a little bit different because of their connection to the land. *eyeroll* All characters are written such that their actions rarely ring true, even though it's not clear what their personalities are really supposed to be (though the author will occasionally flatly tell you, "This character's personality is like this because of that."). The average score on Amazon is 4.4 stars. Do not be fooled. Those reviews had to be left by family and friends of the author.

Anyway, I'm reading Deadhouse Gates now. My package from Better World Books, via abebooks.com, arrived today, so I've got lots of Malazan ahead. Less than 50 pages in, and hardly even grasping much of what's going on with the new characters and locales, I've already derived far more enjoyment from it than from all 469 pages of Battlemage.

Yeah, a little while ago, I was like, "You know, there's so much more that is obviously going to happen in this world. The Seanchan, what comes of Rand after his resurrection in Moridin's body, his children, Perrin's role as an uber-lord..." So I figured I'd hunt around for fan fic. After the first 50 Asmodean-never-died alt-universe tripe-fests, I gave up. If there's good stuff out there, I'd like to read it, maybe, but I'm just going to have to let someone else hunt it down for me.

I'm finally reading The Malazan Book of the Fallen. I started Gardens of the Moon a couple of years ago, but I gave up because I was not getting into it at all. If memory serves, I tried reading it immediately after finishing The Wheel of Time for the second time (this being about five months after I finished reading it the first time). It was just the wrong time to try to get into the series, in every possible way.

Also, since my first attempt, I checked this out, and it gave me some context for the whole story. The first time I tried to read GotM, it was like, "Okay, there are a bunch of different characters that I don't like at all, and I have no idea what any of them are talking about, ever." Keep in mind, I read a good 400 pages of the book, that first time. I did give it a chance. It's just that the tone was all wrong for my headspace, coming out of a WoT reread, and having no clue what was happening really didn't help. I think I'm just past where I stopped on the first attempt, but really, I've been engaged from the start this time. 

Yesterday, I ordered books 2-10 of The Malazan Book of the Fallen. It costs less than $40. For those of you unfamiliar with abebooks.com, I recommend you check it out. When I was in college, I'd buy the books for my classes there. I always got old editions and had to solicit help in completing my assignments (page numbers never match up, etc.), but I'd save hundreds of dollars every semester.